IcarusDaedalus2.0009

IcarusDaedalus2.0009_Condon

OGCMA s.v. "Icarus and Daedalus"

Richard Condon, The Manchurian Candidate (1959) reprint (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows 2003) includes introductory essay by Louis Menand

First edition cover of "The Manchurian Candidate" by Richard Condon, featuring abstract, colorful illustrations

Eleanor Iselin is a frightening character. She will surely stop at nothing to advance her political agenda. Remarkably, she pretends that she is actually promoting her son’s career. But she’s not. Condon introduces her thus:
“It all seemed to revolve around his mother, a woman as ambitious as Daedalus. The sergeant was twenty-two years old.”
This loaded simile creates simultaneously of Mrs. Iselin a Daedalus and of Raymond an Icarus. His eventual fall is assured. Marvelous is the foreboding imputation of inappropriate motives to Mrs. Iselin's great Daedalean undertaking.

OGCMA slides are designed by Roger T. Macfarlane for use in Classical Civilization 241 courses at Brigham Young University.
The present resource contains information assembled for The Oxford Guide to Classical Mythology in the Arts, 1300 - 1990's, edited by J. Davidson Reid (Oxford 1994), and it is used with express permission from Oxford University press.
Address concerns or inquiries to macfarlane@byu.edu.